Blogging is popular nowadays. People take to Tumblr , WordPress, Squarespace and more to share their thoughts with the digital world. Then there are the hipsters who use Dustin Curtis’ Svbtle and Medium. There are, of course, many other platforms out there, but each group has its own preferred way of posting things. My favorite has always been Scriptogr.am because it’s effortless to set up using Dropbox, looks nice, and supports Markdown.

Now there’s a new contender in the Markdown-powered blogging world: Dropplets. When I first saw the mockups of it a few months back, I immediately added it to my list of things to review later. Now it’s at version 1.6, so let’s have a look at things and see if they’re ready to compete with the big boys. (more…)

Well look at that! Just after announcing it would discontinue Reader, Google has decided to release a simple note-taking service, one with the name Keep. When I first heard about it, I thought the service was aiming to compete with Pocket and Instapaper to be an official Google project that allowed you to save anything for viewing later. Something like this would have been fantastic after seeing Reader leave, but that wasn’t Google’s aim for this basic notes service.

When I say basic, I mean it, but there might be more to this little Web and Android app than meets the eye, and the mere icon invites creativity. I investigate after the break. (more…)

People love WordPress for a good reason: it’s so user friendly that basically anyone can use it. Making a new blog post is as easy as logging in and pressing ‘Add new’. With such a wide variety of free and premium plug-ins, most users wouldn’t see a reason to not go with WordPress when starting a new blog. I too thought this, and was really happy running my personal blog on a self-hosted WordPress install. But this all changed a few months ago when I was given an opportunity to test Squarespace.

If you don’t already know, Squarespace is a relatively new service which we’ve reviewed before. And while a lot of things remain the same, many improvements have been made to the service over the years, including better pricing and added features. In this review, I will be going over what I think of Squarespace, and the features that stand out the most to me and that matter to most users.

You’ve got the perfect idea for a business, and are excited about building a product that your customers will love. You work nights and weekends, feverishly, trying to turn your dream into reality. It’s too big of a project for you to do on your own, so you start hiring employees to help you. Before you know it, you’re now spending more of your time trying to keep track of what’s going on in your company than you are building the business you love.

What if there was a way you could keep track of everything going on in your company, but only spend a few minutes each week doing it? 15Five promises to make this possible. Let’s take a look and see if this app could start making managing a growing team a simple task that won’t take anyone away from their real work.

We’re announcing a new type of post on Web.AppStorm today: Quick Look. These short application overviews will give you a description, a few screenshots, and basic information about a particular piece of software. They’re sponsored, so developers pay a small fee to have their app featured in a Quick Look post.

At the end of each post we’ll have a poll for readers to vote in. If you like what you see, you can vote for us to write a full (completely unbiased) review of the software in question.

It’s a great way to find out about new applications you haven’t come across before and a great way for developers to get the word out about their new app. We’ll have a few of these posts appearing soon so you’ll be able to see how they work.

Quick Look posts will be in addition to our regular publishing schedule here at AppStorm. So you’ll continue getting the same great reviews, roundups and guides, plus you’ll now get Quick Looks at new and interesting apps!

We’re very excited by the prospect of showcasing more apps, finding AppStorm a new revenue source to help us grow, and giving developers a promotional tool to market their work. We’d love to hear your feedback on this addition, so feel free to leave a comment or send us an email.

Promote Your App on Quick Look

If you’d like to have your application featured, Quick Look posts cost $49 and will help you reach an audience of people who love web applications! Fill in this form to reserve a post.

With as much technology news as there is, most of us are bound to miss lots of great information. While it would be impossible to cover everything that happens in a week, we would like to bring you a roundup of web app news you may have missed this week.

Generally when we do a giveaway, the winners are announced the following week. Last week’s Myows giveaway was so popular we had to close the comments in just 24 hours! In addition to that, Myows generously gave away 100 paid accounts, which would’ve made for an interesting giveaway announcement (that’s a lot of names!). So, to cap off this week, I’ll be doing something a little different.

While pondering ideas to cap off the week, I thought it would be a good chance to take a look back at the popular posts over the last couple weeks as well as some of the upcoming posts and contests. Also, I would never leave you guys without a tasty morsel of contesty-goodness if I could help it — so read on to see what goodies you can grab from CodeCanyon.